George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a year. They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage.
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A newspaper, not having to act on its descriptions and reports, but only to sell them to idly curious people, has nothing but honor to lose by inaccuracy and non-veracity.
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An interesting play cannot in the nature of things mean anything but a play in which problems of conduct and character of personalimportance to the audience are raised and suggestively discussed.
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We must reform society before we can reform ourselves.
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A vegetarian is not a person who lives on vegetables, any more than a Catholic is a person who lives on cats.
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That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them. But it's horribly lonely not to hear someone else talk sometimes.
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We should have had socialism already, but for the socialists, am quite willing to drop the name if dropping it will help me to get the thing.
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Don't ask me for promises until I know what I am promising.
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When domestic servants are treated as human beings it is not worth while to keep them.
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Paradoxes are the only truths.
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Leisure may be defined as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes, labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation.
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Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.
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Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parent.
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Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles.
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A man's interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself. When you are a child your vessel is not yet full;so you care for nothing but your own affairs. When you grow up, your vessel overflows; and you are a politician, a philosopher, or an explorer and adventurer. In old age the vessel dries up: there is no overflow: you are a child again.
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You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.
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Religion is a good invention in times of stress.
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The person I miss most is the one I could have been.
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That proves it's not by Shaw, because all Shaw's characters are himself: mere puppets stuck up to spout Shaw.
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Make me a beautiful word for doing things tomorrow; for that surely is a great and blessed invention.
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People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.
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It is the first duty of every man not to be poor.
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There is the eternal war between those who are in the world for what they can get out of it and those who are in the world to make it a better place for everybody to live in.
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There is not one single established religion that an intelligent, educated man can believe.